5 Time Leah Lost Something
by Stretch
Summary: Suddenly she’s hit with the responsibilities that come with being the eldest. And she knows that Seattle is dead, along with her dreams, but it matters little compared to the weight that had just been settled onto her shoulders like a yoke.


_**Five Times Leah Lost Something**_

**_(And One Time She Didn't)_**

**1. Her Job**

"Fuck 'em. I'm going to go to Seattle, become a fashion designer or a veterinarian or a kindergarten teacher. Get the hell outta here." She throws her grocery smock in the dumpster behind the Piggly Wiggly.

It's not like it's the first job she's been fired from.

It's not her fault people are stupid.

"Seattle's pretty far away. You planning on leaving me just like that?" Sam asks, sitting on an oil stained blanket in the back of his pickup truck. He flashes her a grin that she does not return.

It's not like this is the first time she's called him like this.

"Of course not, I'm gonna bring you with me." She hops up beside him in the bed and glares at him matter-of-factly. "You can build stuff anywhere." He sees the mascara lines on her cheekbones, where that bathroom paper towels didn't completely wipe them away, but he knows better than to comment.

Leah doesn't cry.

"Yes, but I want to 'build stuff here, on the rez," he sighs. But she bats those ridiculous lashes at him, and touches her lips lightly against the skin of his cheek, and he feels his will start to crumble. He cups her jaw in his massive hand, but Leah jerks away from him suddenly.

"Jesus," she yelps. "You're burning up." She called him for a ride, but before he can protest she's the one with the keys and she's herding him into the passenger side of the cab. "Can't have you dying on me or anything," she teases.

The next day Sam disappears

**2. Sam**

"Leah, wait!" Emily shouts. Her footsteps echo like gunshots against the stones of first beach. Well aimed bullets, they riddle Leah with holes.

"Go. Away," she orders coldly. She lobs rocks into the icy water and pretends there are faces carved into them. One for Emily. One for Sam. One of each and every jeering face she'll have to see at school tomorrow. There aren't enough stones to throw.

"I…I can't explain it," Emily stammers, standing awkwardly down the beach from her. "I love him."

"Well, that just makes it all better then, doesn't it?" Leah's voice is thick with bitter sarcasm. "You may have stolen my boyfriend, but at least you _love_ him. That just patches me right up! Let's go hang out and paint each other's nails!"

Tears spill down Emily's perfect face with reckless abandon. "I'm sorry," she mutters. "I'm so sorry."

Leah brushes past her roughly and charges back to the house. Back to the porch where she found Sam and Emily tangled in each other's arms. Back to the scene of the crime. "You're my cousin, Emily," she calls back harshly. "My family. You're supposed to watch my back, not stab me in it."

She doesn't look back. Emily stays rooted to the beach and Sam is blissfully gone and Leah has the house to herself it seems. But it's too small and the yard it too small and the rez is too small and she just has to _get out_.

She fills a suitcase, then a duffel bag, then a box she pulls down from the attic. And it's not until she's moved on to the egg crate that Leah realizes she has an audience.

Seth stands in her doorway. He doesn't pout because he's fifteen and too old for that and doesn't care about his stupid sister anyway. "Where are you going to go?"

She's too busy throwing miscellaneous crap into boxes to pay attention. She wants to pack everything – picture frames and porcelain ballet dancers and stuffed bears, just to prove that she's not trapped here. But the only person she's managed to convince is herself. And Seth.

"What about your family, aren't we important to you?" he demands. Leah finally stops her flurried movements.

She opens her mouth, but it's not the voice of the big sister who speaks. It's the voice of someone, _something _cynical and deep. It's not bedtime stories and tooth fairies and everything is going to be okay. It's the voice of the painful truth, of adulthood. "Sometimes family can hurt you too."

Seth thinks he understands.

**3. Her Fresh Start**

Leah rents a matchbox in the city – a closet in an apartment subleted by two dueling anorexic models. She has to stand in the hallway to open her dresser drawers, and the twin bed makes it almost impossible to turn around in the small space, let alone live. But it's hers, and it's not La Push, so for right now it's enough.

It's enough.

At night she tends bar in a club called Hell's Belles. It's too dark and too loud and too crowded for anyone to care about her attitude or the fact that her ID's fake. As long as she serves enough liquor and doesn't break too many glasses, no one cares what she does.

During the day she writes papers on Kafka and fills a sketchbook with doodles of gowns and pantsuits and various other haute couture pieces (she doesn't know what that means just quite yet, but the words just sound right). Clearwater Designs has a certain ring to it she thinks.

She spirits around campus and pretends not to be an affirmative action recipient and turns in her assignments on time, and _nobody notices her_. Free from the gossip of aging aunts, squabbling on their front steps, and former schoolmates who whisper about 'where they went wrong'. Her anonymity is a blessing.

Until that afternoon when the phone rings and model #1 tells her (annoyed that her Tyra marathon has been interrupted) that it's her mother. The second the receiver touches her ear and she hears Sue's voice crack, she knows it's all over.

"Leah, you need to come home. It's your father."

**4. Dad**

The rain refuses to let up, even for a second. But despite the consistency of the storms in the spring, this precipitation feels deliberate. "The spirits are crying," a great aunt says. Doesn't really matter who or what it is, the Olympic peninsula is mourning the loss of Harry Clearwater. Sobbing for one of her sons.

Doing one thing Leah can't manage to do.

It's been three days since she came home. Three days since she stood beside the hospital bed and waited and prayed. She's never been the praying type, but so late in the game she figures it can't hurt. But her father never wakes up, and she never gets to say her goodbyes, and now everyone is crying but her…and Seth.

Seth stands like a man beside her as their father is placed in the ground. Billy Black says a few words, all the tribal elders do. Charlie Swan speaks at the end, a Quileute through proxy and friendship. They all talk of closure and the life after next and release from pain and suffering, but Leah is too busy being concerned with the problems of this life to pay much attention.

Suddenly she's hit with the responsibilities that come with being the eldest. And she knows that Seattle is dead, along with her dreams, but it matters little compared to the weight that had just been settled onto her shoulders like a yoke. Leah was the man of the house now, and she would carry that burden.

Just like her father would have wanted.

Seth doesn't say much – too riddled with loss, too bitter at her for leaving in the first place. Leah finds him in the house, sprawled on his bed, hiding from friends and relatives who have come to pay their respects with tuna noodle casseroles.

"Can I come in?" She hovers in the doorway. Seth looks up at her with solemn eyes. He's gotten so big since she left. Growing like a weed, their father used to say. His face is rapidly becoming that of a man.

"Whatever," he mutters. But she sits on the edge of his bed, and she holds his hand just like when he was little. And she pretends not to notice when the tears slip down his cheeks.

He returns the favor.

**5. Her Humanity**

The Dress Barn in Port Angeles has become even more of a prison than the reservation ever could be. She works in the kids department and makes $6.75 an hour. Her feet hurt, her head hurts, their bank account hurts. And every time she comes home and sees her father's car parked at the end of the drive, her heart hurts too.

She trudges down the hall, pasts Seth's bedroom. Empty.

"Mom," she pokes her head into the room that Sue used to share with her father. She sits in the too large bed by herself and clutches a pillow, staring into space. "Mom, where's Seth?"

"Out," she answers without looking.

"Out? It's almost midnight!" Leah's voice climbs an octave, and Sue finally glances at her curiously. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that I'm his mother and it's my choice how late he stays out, Leah."

But Leah is already walking towards the door, digging through her purse for car keys with shaking hands. Red touches the corner of her vision as she fumes. She hears Sue pursuing her down the hall, but she doesn't care. She's going to go find her brother. She won't have him out until all hours of the night, falling in with that little boyscout troop that…that _he _is running these days. She won't have it.

"Leah, stop!" Sue demands, grabbing her daughter by the elbow.

And then Leah explodes. Her mind is a whirl of blackness and rage and she snaps at her mother with a mouth that isn't hers. But her head is too full of _painragefearangerhurt _that she can't process the other brain that boils up beneath her own. Full of unfamiliar instincts and images and scents and urges and she's flying. Adrenaline pulses behind eyes that see too well in the darkness as the forest opens up to her sleek body. Running, running, running the red fades and the pounding in her chest replaces the rage and Leah comes back into her own.

She tries to scream but her mouth can no longer form the words. Her new body misinterprets the impulse and an earsplitting howl reverberates through the midnight air, the sound cutting all the way to Olympic Bay.

_I'm crazy_ she cries inside her own mind. _I've lost my mind_

_No, you haven't._ This time the voice is not her own. Deep and throaty and she knows who it is because she can see him…see inside him. And it hits her like a wave, a wall of emotions and memories as foreign as her body. In her head…with his voice, she see snippets of time, little reels of tape. Herself, her real self, in a blue prom dress running and laughing in the field behind the high school. Herself lying on the beach with Maria, catching the brief flecks of sun that percolated through the clouds. Herself, sitting in the back of a pickup truck behind the grocery store sporting a scowl and runny mascara. She sees them all through eyes that aren't her own, and feels emotions tinged with familiarity and a scent she can't quite place.

_Sam_

It's Sam and she's inside his head and his thoughts are in hers and he sees all her hurt and love and loss and she sees his adoration for Emily and herself in a skin not her own and the voices of others join them and are overwhelming her new found senses and it's much too much too much.

_Leah, stop_

But she can't, she won't. The forest blurs into a streak of black as she runs faster, faster. It's not enough, the voices are still with her and its still paws that crush the composted earth beneath her and she wants silence and feet and hands and a mouth to keep screaming with until the nightmare ends.

The blackness encroaches on her peripheral vision. Faster, faster, it threatens to overwhelm her.

_Leah!_

Too much. She throws herself into the darkness willingly.

She does not resurface

**6. Seth**

"Leah!"

It's Seth's voice. But in her ears not in her…head? Hair falls into her eyes. Her own silken black hair. Her own eyes. Sharp grass stabs into the naked flesh of her stomach, her thighs, but it doesn't matter. She digs her fingers, long and delicately tapered, into the damp earth, relishing the feel of it against her body. The world is blurry, a mess of sensations and sounds that she can't process. There are voices all around her.

"Leah!" her brother screams through the haze. She clings to his voice, the only firm think in a twisted and distorted nightmare. She wants to scream for him, but her lips have forgotten how to speak. Her throat seizes up.

"Get the truck over here." It's another voice she recognizes, so close that she tries to push it away feebly.

Sam. She doesn't want him in her nightmare.

Too warm hands grab her sticky flesh and pull her upwards, out of the soil, out of the grass. "Leah," Seth croons now. The murky sea of sky and stars parts and his worried face stared down at her. "Don't worry Sis, I've got you." He covers her in a musty blanket stained with oil, and even through the cloud in her mind she recognizes its rough texture, it's scent from a long time ago…

"Seth," she croaks, from between parched lips. His hand find its way into her larger one, and she realizes that they're both burning. "I'm…" Crazy. A freak. A monster.

"It's okay," he assures her. The haze parts and she sees other sets of eyes peering down at her through the darkness. Faces she knows…and some she doesn't care to see. "We've got you, you're safe." The word echoes in the blank expanse of her mind, bouncing and rebounding and repeating over and over again.

Safe, in the arms of her family.

Safe.


End file.
